Why I am a lawyer
Why am I a lawyer? The reasons why today are not the same as the reasons I approached it. It is not that like the writer of Ecclesiastes I am sated, but that my pictures of reality and people and how I might help have changed. At one time it was about keeping money from the tax collector, or creating and preserving wealth for people. Now I have a wider view of wealth and a longer view of the role of Wills and particularly what people do for each other, even when they are generations apart.
How hard it is to think about, to picture, people seven generations after me. I have seen and met those two generations on. I can picture babies being born, screaming at the indignity of it all, primally asking to have their needs met. I can picture men and women working together and hope that they are working to help each other. But what their faces look like, what challenges they face, how they meet those challenges, how they center their lives—these are things difficult to see clearly.
So why am I a lawyer, today’s take? To help people communicate with other generations. To help people meet and be met by a world fundamentally wanting them. To help people get through the details so they can get to the living of life.
One long second
Human life is
Not a brief instant
But an enduring now
Plenty of time
Beyond time
To do what we can in
Large ways if we choose
Everyday ways for sure
—With capitals—
To Live, Laugh
Ever to Love
Why am I a lawyer? To work with people at the business of working with people, at finding what works, what gives life smooth handles, what encourages whole life living.
Why am I a lawyer? To help people fulfill themselves, to see their purposes larger and get on with those purposes.
Why am I a lawyer? To share myself with my friends. To give gifts of myself to others so that I might live large in and through them.
Why am I a lawyer? To bring peace to the world, to resolve irritations and irritate the resolutions, to bring the world to peace: wholeness, fullness, amplification. To encourage people to get along, to let difficulties go so they can grasp the smooth handle. To be among my friends and make their paths easier.
Why am I a lawyer? To bring love to the world: love for family, God however conceived, community. Love for all humanity, all life, all the world. Love in forms weak and strong, seen and unseen, realizing the unrealized, which is that love is what we live within.
Why am I a lawyer? To be in and of the world, helping it work. Helping us work. To conspire together—to breathe together, to bring, to a world often seen as dried out, spirit. To give each and all wings of imagining and dreaming.
There is more yet to say, and I do not know what it yet is. Law is about peace and intercourse and more, more, more.
:- Doug.
